Why?

I've always liked "why?" as a question-starter; both asking and answering.  Kids asking "why?" questions fill me with delight.  Partly this is because I'm an infuriating know-all who just loves the chance to share my limited knowledge and uninformed opinions about all manner of stuff, but also it's because if you don't ask "why" then you don't discover even the most rudimentary of things.

This seems to be borne out the moment you pick up a magazine, turn on the TV or radio, or browse the Internet.  There seems to be a craze for actively not discovering anything; for everybody to think they're "great just as they are", with no need to live lives outside of their own limited headspace.  And, worryingly, the craze extends to all the lookers-on regarding this as funny and entertaining.

Case in point: last week I went to stay with a friend in Newmarket for the weekend.  Whilst driving around the countryside we had the radio on as background noise.  Part of the show we were listening to featured some of the cast of 'The Only Way is Essex' answering general knowledge questions.  "What's the capital of Spain?" the presenter asked Joey Essex, who stumbled over this mentally towering conundrum for about a minute, before settling on "errrr, is it Malia?"  Further questions followed with similarly stupid and uninformed answers supplied, much to the hilarity of the presenter and the radio crew...and the cast themselves.  What a lark!

And as I sat listening to the show, I wondered if I had become the only person on the planet who thinks this lack of basic awareness is in any way funny or entertaining.  Isn't it hit-your-head-against-the-nearest-wall despairing that a 21 year-old man isn't familiar with basic geography; basic enough for children in infants' school to be familiar with?  How is that in any way funny?!  Why is it being celebrated?  I genuinely don't get it.  I felt like an eighty year-old, faced with one of those "whole yard of ale!" drinking glasses for the first time and realising there is nothing I understand about the modern world any more.  It's moved on somehow, and it's left me behind.

It called to mind an old series of 'Big Brother' in which they'd put a sixty year-old headteacher who'd left after about a day because she couldn't cope with the lack of intelligent conversation in the house.  "They're not intellectually curious!  They don't ask questions!" she'd said in disbelief, although in retrospect perhaps it hadn't been the most intelligent decision of her own life to apply for the series in the first place if she'd wanted to discuss Nietzsche's theories on nihilism with a selection of wannabe glamour models and celebrity grin-flashers.  But I remembered her disappointed, disoriented face, and I suspect mine had looked quite similar on that day in Newmarket, as I listened to Lydia Bright try her best to dispel any theory that she might possibly be at all Bright by nature.